More

Search Posts

Rounding & Cheese

Yet­sre­day for lunch I stopped at a local piz­za joint for a cou­ple of slices and a diet cola, I bought 3 slices, and told the guy that he need’nt heat them up, because I wasn’t going to eat them for ‘hours’, he put them on a paper plate and asked me…

“you need a bag?,” now there was no snap­py retort, or abu­sive con­ver­sa­tion I stop in this place fair­ly often and any form of abuse is just going to yeild me sali­va on my edibles..so i chilled, at least ver­bal­ly, I stared at him and ner­vous­ly smiled, hadn’t I said I wasn’t eat­ting them for hours? did he hon­est­ly think I was going to walk around with loose cold piz­za on a ‘less than qual­i­ty paper plate’, The whole exchange up to this point was very awk­ward, but wait..it got bet­ter.

so I got my bag ‘o slices and my cup­pa­coke, and he rang me up, my total was $6.35, I tossed out a tenspot and he sweati­ly hand­ed me my change, 4 bucks??? whatthe­duece? so being me I ques­tioned it.

﻿S: “You gave me the wrong change…”

Piz­za: “I smoothed down”

S: “smoothed?”

S: So you smoothed away 25 cents off my bill?

Piz­za: yeah, makes the change eas­i­er.

S: I see… okay, lat­er

[and I head­ed towards the door ]

S: Say, just out of curi­ousi­ty how many slices do you thing ya’ll sell in a day?

Piz­za: We go through about 50 — 70 slice pie’s a day on the week­days, and prob­a­bly twice that on a sat­ur­day or a sun­day.

S: Wow that’s a lot of pizza’s.

[and I left]

So the geek in me has to do the Math, lets assume that Piz­za dude ‘Smooths’ away any change under 50 cents, lets start with a week­day.

Still no change, so per­haps Pizza’s method­ol­o­gy is sound?… not hard­ly, we have to look at the impact on indi­vid­ual sales, remem­ber based on our orig­i­nal con­cept he ‘smooths’ away all change under 50 cents.

Now I’m not an eco­nom­ics expert, but giv­ing away almost 900 bucks of rev­enue is prob­a­bly an eco­nom­ic no-no. If you think of it in Piz­za terms it’s like giv­ing away 504 slices of piz­za for free.

They could elim­i­nate ‘Smooth­ing’ cut the slice prices by 60% and still increase prof­it, AND they’d have the bestest + cheap­est piz­za in town.